New Microsoft ads aim to dispel the ‘dark side of tech’

Microsoft is beginning a big new advertising campaign Sunday evening, and the company wants to show people how four of its major products work together in the living room – and help families break free of the “dark side of tech.”

The campaign is the Redmond-based firm’s biggest ever, said David Webster, Microsoft’s chief marketing strategist. Microsoft isn’t disclosing the cost, but it will air in 35 markets worldwide on television and as pre-roll ads for online video.

Faced with mounting competition from Apple, which promotes that all of its iProducts work seamlessly together, Microsoft is hoping to inform people about not just its products, but its entire technology platform. The ads, airing first in the U.S., aim to show how Windows, Office, Windows Phone and the Xbox 360 all commingle.

“I think now you’re getting to the point that more general consumers are thinking, ‘I need to look at my entire tech portfolio, not just one product,'” Webster told seattlepi.com. “‘I want to buy into a system, not just one product.’ They want them all.”

Webster said the new campaign is focusing on consumers with families – mainly with young children – who make up the bulk of holiday shoppers. Some of the ads will show families using all four products: playing Xbox with Kinect, taking video with a Windows Phone, editing it with Windows 7, emailing it with Outlook and uploading it to the Web in what Webster called an “epic sharing moment.” Other ads will show family members using two or three of the products in more specific ways.

Webster

But Microsoft’s advertising message is that its products won’t push families apart and leave them “alone together.” Similar to the Windows Phone ad strategy, which promises “a phone to save you from your phone,” the campaign focuses on “Microsoft products bringing people together,” he said.

“That notion that technology is sort of trapping us and isolating us from the rest of the world was something that we really noticed,” Webster said. He called it the “dark side of tech.”

Such combined campaigns have two major benefits, he said. First, they may encourage consumers who use Windows and Office to check out other Microsoft products. Second, they may lend Microsoft’s credibility to new products and others that people may not have known come from Microsoft.

For instance, Webster said, many people know about the Xbox, but many people don’t know that it’s a Microsoft product.

“Historically, you’ve seen us do individual campaigns for Office, Windows, Xbox and phone,” Webster said, noting that the individual campaigns will continue independently. “What we’re doing now is bringing all those products … under one campaign umbrella.”

The ads themselves are not yet available online. Watch for them here after they first air on Sunday.